The Arts Council and Aosdána express great sadness at the passing of artist and Aosdána member Tim Robinson.
Speaking today, Prof. Kevin Rafter, Chair of the Arts Council said: ““Tim Robinson was one of Ireland’s most celebrated and revered writers of non-fiction. Consistently described as a ‘renaissance man’ and a ‘polymath’, Robinson was a unique and illuminating voice in Irish letters.
“Robinson’s writing, so often concerned with nature and the material world, allows the reader to see our world with the astonishment and awe it deserves. I have no doubt that his work will be read and marvelled over for generations to come.”
Born in England in 1935, Timothy Robinson studied mathematics at Cambridge, taught in Istanbul and worked in the visual arts in Vienna and London. From 1972 to 1984, he lived on the Aran Islands, writing and making maps of the islands, the Burren and Connemara.
The two volumes of Stones of Aran were published in 1986 and 1995, and Setting Foot on the Shores in Connemara and Other Writings in 1996. He also edited J.M. Synge’s The Aran Islands for Penguin Books. My Time in Space, a collection of autobiographical essays, appeared in 2001, followed by a collection of fictions, Tales and Imaginings, in 2002. Connemara: Listening to the Wind, the first volume of a trilogy on Connemara, appeared from Penguin Ireland in 2006, and won the Argosy Prize for non-fiction in the Irish Book Awards.
He lived in Roundstone, Connemara, where his partner Máiréad runs Folding Landscapes, which published his maps.